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Your Kids’ Lunch is Healthy, But What About Their Lunchbox?

We put a lot of thought into what food to pack our kids for lunch, making sure they have a balanced, healthy meal with quality ingredients. But too often the lunchbox gets overlooked—do you know what ingredients and materials are in your child’s food containers?

If you’re packing their sandwiches, chips, and fruit in plastic, it may be time to rethink these containers. Many plastics contain toxic additives meant to influence their color, texture, hardness, and shape in order to improve performance and reduce cost.

Commonly used additives include plasticizers, such as adipates and phthalates, and Bisphenol A (BPA). These chemicals and others found in plastics have come under scrutiny from Canada, Europe, and our own Environmental Protection Agency for their potential to cause harmful developmental effects in children. Yet they’re still found in many containers, where they can leach out of the plastic, come into contact with food and then get ingested into kids’ bodies.

A safer, healthier option is a stainless steel container such as LunchBots. Widely used in the food industry, stainless steel is an alloy composed of natural elements; it’s sanitary, durable, easy to clean, and most importantly, free of toxins or chemicals commonly found in plastics. As an added bonus, stainless steel containers are reusable, so they’re better for the planet and for packing kids’ lunches.

An entrepreneur with a passion for healthy living, Jacqueline Linder founded LunchBots in 2008 to help inspire people to pack healthier meals and reduce the use of plastic. In five years since its launch, the LunchBots brand has grown to represent a community of people of all ages who share a love of healthy eating and eco-responsibility.

I use Laptop Lunches. It’s plastic but BPA-free. It contains smaller containers (bento boxes) within that you can take out to microwave select parts of the lunch.

http://shadesofgreenneo.blogspot.com/ Starsx7

Pyrex containers. I don’t like to use plastic in microwave (even if it is BPA free)

unrealistic!

The prices of a lunchbot are completely unreasonable for most families.I have 3 children . if I purchased a lunch bag and box for each child that would be around 120.00 for just those items. Kids lose things constantly so I wouldn’t even say its an investment. I’d say to the people truly interested in changing the quality of the way we live they need to make it affordable for incomes at both ends if the spectrum. .

Emily

Fooducate, can you provide an unbiased discussion of lunchboxes? I really didn’t want to read an advertisement disguised as a blog post.